There is a pretty general consensus that it is the worst zerg map. The problem isn't tanks on the ledge, it is thors on the ledge since they can reach the expansion. And as mentioned, it is easy for Terran to take the islands, and then use their base ledge and their expansion ledge to defend. Drop the Thor up there, then bring up 4-6 SCVs and not much you can do. Wasn't the case so much in BW since you could stop the tanks with a few mutas and then control the ledge after that. But thors really changed that.

It is a shame because it is my favorite SC map, I'm sure I've played the most games on that map in SC and SC2(play a lot of 2s customs on it). My favorite map now is Met.

11/11/2010 10:56:26 AM

Maybe i just dont play against good Terrans, but Thors really dont worry me when I go muta.

Mass marine and i guess BC's worry me. But Thors really dont pose that big of a problem. If they can get a LOT of thors then at that point my muta count is through the roof along with lings.

11/11/2010 11:41:15 AM

Lost temple is definitely a terran favored map in each match-up. PvZ is about as balanced there as any other map.

11/11/2010 12:29:59 PM

It really isn't a lot of thors, because with bounce action and magic box you start to reach a point of diminishing returns on the thors and the mutas tend to just get exponentially stronger.

But 1-2 Thors very early in a game with marine/maurader support is pretty potent especially with 6-8 SCVs following along on auto repair. Thors are also the easiest tier 3 unit to get without giving much up. Fairly easy for a terran to defend early with some marines, pump out 4-6 helions to harass or a banshee and then have thors out. The tech switch from banshee to thor is really easy. It is why I'm starting to shift away from mass mutas against terran and going more toward 4-6 queens for banshee defense and staying roaches. Or just making like 4-6 mutas to bait the terran to going heavy thor and going Roach/bling when they switch to marine/thor.

Right now the Marine is giving everyone fits, that unit is the one that worries me especially if the Terran is good at spreading/microing vs. bling. They scale better then any unit in the game with upgrades, are cheap, fairly mobile with stim. I expect an MM nerf on Terran incoming.

11/11/2010 1:20:46 PM

Yeah the marine really is just such a pain in the ass unit. They are cheap, can be easily produced in high numbers and they do sooo much damage. The zergs real only response to marines is banelings. Personally I would love to see ultras get a big boost against marines. I would like to see marines changed in this way - a minor attack speed increase but a decent damage reduction. Enough that their dps gets just a minor decrease but that they are less effective vs units with armor. That would make the ultra with its big armor buff more viable vs mass marines.

11/11/2010 1:56:57 PM

^^I've seen a few games of dimaga where he just gets that extra couple queens and it really seems to be the right thing to do as zerg. When you aren't using them to vomit larva or defend, they're great for getting that creep highway going, and we all know how beneficial that can be. I don't know zerg that well, but if I played zerg more I'd probably try the extra queen approach. It seemed to allow him to do a lot of good things, which in turn helped him win several ZvT's I've watched. Only downside is that it seems to delay lair tech, however, the way dimaga plays sometimes it doesn't seem like a bad thing

11/11/2010 3:19:56 PM

Lately I've actually ZvT and ZvP I've been going 14 hatch, fast lair and building a queen at my xpo. I then pump out an additional queen at my expo and one at my main when the lair finishes. It seems most people get two queens first and use one queen to vomit, the other to spread creep at their natural, this slows down the initial creep spread but i can catch up quickly by skipping a vomit at my xpo for an additional tumor. I'm typically one to go early early upgrades so if I need to I'll throw down a couple spore crawlers though I think it might be more beneficial to just pump out a 4th/5th queen. Against toss it has worked great - by the time they hit my base I have very good creep spread and I'm pumping out hydras already. Against terran it allows for very fast mutas or roach speed/burrow.

11/11/2010 3:50:57 PM

Playing my usual game of dota before work - randomed the reaper and went 14-5-2... absolutely raped. Best part was when we were making a push into their base and I dropped 4 remote mines in the chaos. They managed to push us out and I died - I immediately recovered, blew the bombs and got a triple kill

I think he might be one of my new favorites haha.

11/12/2010 7:56:18 AM

lolol

11/12/2010 2:23:38 PM

Yeah that was my thought the entire game, it was seriously hilarious. We had several massive fights that were like 3v3, 4v4 and the reaper owns in the chaos. Laying down spider mines and remote mines as well as tons of turrets, its hilarious. Everyones below 50% hp and the other team thinks they have a chance, then boom, they are dead or in the red. I think I probably got like 12 out of the 15 kills from remote/spider mines and every single one was so funny.

11/12/2010 2:33:33 PM

the reaper can be very effective, but i like to play the role of the ganker, and the reaper isn't exactly a ganker. zeratul is my favorite because he's well, probably the best non-broken (this means exclude the hydra) ganker.

11/12/2010 2:37:45 PM

Yeah I mean he can't exactly be a ganker in the sense of meeting someone in the woods by himself and taking him down in a straight up fight, but with preperation and using mines effectively he can take down solo heroes very easily. I had twice the kills of everyone else on my team the game this morning, he definitely can rack up the kills.

And the stalker is by far the best non broken ganker. When I can warp to somewhere in the woods near you, charge up on a neutral creep and run up shooting at max speed with 200-400 extra damage on each hit... yeah thats rape. Throw in 2 contamination shards, a stun and the ability to actually gank entire teams with multishot... he owns.

[Edited on November 12, 2010 at 3:50 PM. Reason : a]

11/12/2010 3:49:39 PM

Late game probably yeah, but Zeratul can start ganking at like level 6.

I figured out how to use the zealot, went 11-2 eariler today with him.

11/12/2010 6:44:26 PM

While the stalker goes into WTF mode around level 12 or so (able to instantly kill a wave of creeps/squad of neutral creeps for almost no mana) he can effectively gank after level 6 as well. And hes actually pretty easy to get a first blood with, if someone over extends at all then I can just trap them and kill them easily early game.

11/12/2010 6:58:29 PM

titans78 don't scroll down...
































Zerg power! Nestea took the GSL 2 finals this morning.

11/13/2010 4:25:25 PM

haha actually I woke up just in time to watch game 6 and 7 live.

I need to go back and watch the first 5 but fun to watch those 2 games live.

11/13/2010 4:29:36 PM

GSL needs some ProtisRobits to take over and get a Protoss victory

11/13/2010 4:29:39 PM

Yeah in the GSL you have to play actual games, it isn't a DOTA competition.

11/13/2010 5:48:59 PM

I'll let tester borrow my account for the gsl, because he is the real protisrobit, and all the protisfanatics out there will bask in our glory.

in all seriousness, we need more good protoss players, i'm tired of all the zergs

11/13/2010 8:27:22 PM

Had a pretty ridiculous game of dota this morning, went 28-1-10 with the stalker in a 3v5 What made it worse was that we had an Egon on our team who poached at least 8 kills off me. It was domination.

I'm not liking where GSL3 is going. Protoss seems to be getting owned once again and I really don't want protoss to get a buff (I think they are fine, they just need to learn to do something other then 4 gate). Lots of big names getting knocked out and unfortunately not many foreigners making it, I think so far only Ret and Idra have qualified.

11/16/2010 12:31:21 PM

Ret, Idra, Haypro and Jinro all made it, along with 1 other person outside of Korea.. can't remember who it was. 3 Team liquid players making it is a pretty good showing. HuK was 1 game away and lost.

Seems like a lot of toss players lost on the 3rd game which was scrap station, a map that is probably the best for zerg and terran and not so good for toss.

My guess is we are going to see an early game buff to protoss and the trade-off will be a late game nerf. They need to make the robotics bay and observers cheaper so that the Toss can get obs without having to also go robo tech.

11/16/2010 2:06:53 PM

I have no problem at all with where observers are on the tech tree. Considering an observer is basically a small maphack I think it deserves having a high cost. Comparing the toss/terran scouting to zerg the zerg are still way behind. Not enough toss scout using sentries, they have a free method of scouting very early on.

11/16/2010 2:29:27 PM

well 100/100 is cheap, but not free. plus you usually want to get warpgates out ASAP.


Protoss need some kind of early game buff, and the game needs to evolve somehow that protoss aren't basically forced to go robotech in every matchup.

[Edited on November 16, 2010 at 2:58 PM. Reason : asdf]

11/16/2010 2:52:16 PM

Oh true I forgot that you have to research hallucinate and it comes from the cybernetics. All the same, toss have very very flexible scouting available. Zerg aren't the best at seeing what their opponent is doing but they are the best at seeing what they are not doing. Personally I think toss need a nerf for their late game and I'm not really sure what more people want out of them early game. Zealots are incredibly cost effective, stalkers own pretty much every zerg unit except slings and forcefields are one of the most OP mechanics in the game. Maybe the only thing the toss could really use is a more mobile ground unit, maybe something like a mini diamondback would be pretty cool. As a whole I think toss are one of the most well rounded races, though I would like to see carriers and the mothership be made usable while reducing the effectiveness of storm on the large zerg balls required to combat large gateway forces.

In regards to robo - I have the least difficulty with robo forces. I would love it if every toss I played when 2 gate robo. The toss forces that scare me are mass gateway with high templar and archons.

[Edited on November 16, 2010 at 3:03 PM. Reason : a]

11/16/2010 3:01:40 PM

the reason that you see so many 2 gate robo builds is because as the game stands right now, it's probably overall the "safest" build in every matchup. It allows you do deal with just about everything effectively, except muta, and you suffer some in mobility because immortals are slow, and you need several colossi before you can move out and you need a ton of shit around it to protect them. warp prisms are underused though.

as safe as they are, it's really easy for a terran or zerg to exploit the 2 gate robo. many protoss struggle to just get the colossi up (because it takes a while, and if you rush for them, you will get crushed by a good player since you won't have the gateway army to protect the colossi)

stalkers probably need a vs. armored buff (nothing too big, an extra two points or so would work perfect) to deal with roachs more effectively, which would keep you from having to get robo for immortals. It'd also probably make kiwikaki happy

you might get people to get warp prisms if the speed upgrade was free

11/16/2010 3:17:14 PM

While I agree that void prisms need more usage I think its crazy to consider giving stalkers more + armor to counter roaches. They already counter roaches pretty hard unless the roaches outmass them and get them trapped. Roaches barely have any + armor damage at all (I think 2?). Zerg units in general have almost no bonuses vs other types of units. I would like to see roaches get + vs light to have them be a better counter to marines.

And in regards to immortals they straight rape roaches. Name one zerg unit who straight rapes anything not including something stupid like mutas vs a unit that can't hit air.

Personally though I think the biggest change that needs to be made is to increase the effectiveness of armor against marines. It would greatly decrease the ability to abuse marines in the late game.

[Edited on November 16, 2010 at 3:31 PM. Reason : a]

11/16/2010 3:30:58 PM

tester didn't qualify again? WHAT?

11/16/2010 4:43:54 PM

So I really want to hit the 250/500 portraits in 1v1 but its taking fucking forever. I'm not winning at the 80% rate I was on my way to diamond and I'm not playing nearly as much now due to work so I probably won't hit it for like a year. So I decided I'm going to just 6/7 pool every match until I drop down to bronze/silver and just farm wins for a while until I'm up to 500, then I'll go back to actually trying and hit diamond again. So this morning I played 3 games before work.. all 3 were 7 pools again 1800~ diamonds, all 3 I raped them. The whole point was that I need to lose in diamond so it makes it easier for me to win but apparently thats not happening quite yet :p

11/18/2010 9:06:41 AM

Just drone rush, even faster.

I ended up with an extra game account so I started a 2nd account mostly just to 1v1 with and not really worry about winning/losing and just to play a lot of ladder to get better. I'm tired of losing on my main account simply because I don't practice 1v1 enough and custom games are hard to get on all the different maps.

I ended up going 5-0 and being placed in plat, and am now 9-1 and it keeps matching me up with 1800-2000 point diamond players. I guess the cool thing is I get like 50 points a win, and in my one loss lost like 2 points. I bet the dudes I'm beating are pretty pissed they must be losing 20+ points. The system is really stupid. Was thinking I'd cruise to 20-30 wins playing some Gold/Plats but I guess not, maybe the system isn't stupid it is really smart and knows I'm on a smurf account.

Also played in another tournament last night, won the first round game and then lost to a dude that is like 173 on the US top 200. It wasn't even close.

11/18/2010 11:07:38 AM

The way I see it though is if I just drone rush I'm going to probably be losing 95% of my games until I hit bronze. The games will last 2 minutes or so probably. If I do nothing but 6/7 pool my games will probably last 5-10 minutes but I should win 30-50% of them until I hit bronze. However I am finding 6 pools very ineffective against terran lately as so many of them are becoming the early aggressors and by the time I get to their base they have a rax up already so I can't delay that. One of my games this morning I managed to delay the barracks/wall off with a drone while my lings got there, my lings managed to do a decent amount of damage but didn't kill him off, I just droned up hard and rushed to nydus and gged him with 50 lings .

I find toss very easy to basically auto gg with a 6 pool if you can kill their pylon and zerg are pretty easy if I can get a spine crawler or two up in their base. I think against terran rather then trying to take out scvs I need to try and focus down their rax/pick off scvs while the rest of my lings head over. Maybe even focus down a quick supply depot to block him with only scvs. 6 lings vs the 12-14 scvs your opponent will have just get straight raped.

11/18/2010 11:14:06 AM

Even better might be doing the 7RR that gets you the roaches at like the 4:30 mark vs. Terran. Then 6 pool toss and zerg.

11/18/2010 2:59:21 PM

Thats true 7RR might be more successful. My only concern with that is that right now my goal is to drop down into bronze where I will be able to do it quickly, 7RR will probably quickly get me out of bronze and make my 6pool less effective. Of course I don't want to reach a point where I am winning every game with a 6pool because then I'll just move right back up.

Basically I just want to try and get in as many games as possible, ideally like 10/hr so I can maybe get 10 wins a day in the two hours I typically have to play. Hopefully going into it with that mentality it will let me play more games, right now I can barely play like 3 games in a row because it stresses me out so much since I am focusing on so much/trying to win.

Stupid reason to sacrifice my record/rating just for portraits, but its not like the ladder system really means shit anyways. Plus I like the infestor portrait much more then my stupid hydralisk

11/18/2010 3:39:36 PM

roach rush against protoss is difficult to defend if you do it properly, probably more difficult than 6 pool.

11/18/2010 4:04:09 PM

Yeah but keep in mind I'm probably going to have to go with a strategy that has a 50% win rate at bronze/silver. If I go with something like 7RR which you could probably win at like 70% up to diamond (probably even ~1500 diamond) then I'm not going to be able to farm wins as efficiently.

Of course I could just stay in diamond and win at probably like a 40-50% rate using a 7RR in every matchup but I dont think that would be as efficient as dropping to a lower league and winning at 50% in 2-3 minutes faster. Probably what I'll do is just 6 pool as much as possible until I drop to bronze, then once I'm winning at a consistent rate I'll just drop out of a game after winning one and get the auto loss to keep my MMR down. Its going to take forever though unless I just purposely lose like 30 matches in a row as my MMR is currently like ~1900 diamond. But as long as I'm winning/losing fast I figure I'll be accomplishing the same thing.

Plus it will be fun to have to go from bronze up to diamond again, I'll enjoy getting tons of easy matches once I start that trip

11/18/2010 4:24:07 PM

if anyone figures out how to use chuck in dota, let me know. played against a decent team as him randomed, went something terrible like 2-10

11/18/2010 4:52:03 PM

So my 6/7pool experiment that started because the ladder system fucking sucks has shown me that the ladder system fucking sucks. I'm 13-9 since yesterday against 1800-2000~ diamond players and I've increased to 1870 in the process. Diamond means absolutely nothing and these players are fucking bad. Just beat a toss who went nexus first without scouting at all and basically didnt throw down a forge/gate until i was in his base with lings at which point he auto gged.

11/19/2010 7:24:52 AM

isnt the goal to get through as many games as possible? if quick 6 pools are winning that much does it matter?

11/19/2010 8:54:42 AM

Oh no it completely is working out fine, I just wasn't expecting it to work this well. I didn't think I would be able to have a 50% win rate with the 6pool until I had dropped down to at least silver or so. It amazes me how well it is working though, I completely understand getting got off guard on a 4 player map when you just get bad luck scouting the other two spots, but on a two player map when I'm getting scouted before my pool finishes and still winning? Ridiculous, someone who is ranked in blizzards so called best league should not be that bad.

The ladder system is just stupid, it thinks its balanced by letting people get super inflated scores then matching you against someone who is either much worse then you or much better. If you beat the person much better you get an inflated bigger score and if you lose not much happens.

11/19/2010 9:19:55 AM

so zags and i were playing some dota, and we got matched against a decent team with terrrrrriiiibbblllee teammates. zags decided to challenge one of their guys to a 1v1, and i gave him maphaxors and he won haha.

11/19/2010 10:25:51 PM

reported

enjoy your ban bm

11/19/2010 10:26:54 PM

Quote :

"Oh no it completely is working out fine, I just wasn't expecting it to work this well. I didn't think I would be able to have a 50% win rate with the 6pool until I had dropped down to at least silver or so."

The funniest thing to me in playing in Bronze/Silver and watching Diamond level replays is how it's a completely different game. It's not as easy as you'd think to six pool in the low levels because Terran walls hard and a lot of Protoss go cannon in the mineral line first thing.

11/19/2010 11:51:49 PM

^^^ To be fair I think I probably would've raped him anyways. I went early mass sling expand, he went roaches and made a wall off at his main and rather then being smart and teching to mutas he teched to.... DOUBLE BANELING NEST.

So by the time he had any lair tech (infestor den with 1 infestor) I had about 25 mutas.

^ Thats probably very true, when I started to move up from silver to diamond was when I really got my stable and safe 14 gas 14 pool build down. In silver there probably is more cheese then diamond so while they might not respond to it in the best way they probably are more prepared for it. I'd say the sweet spot for the 6 pool might be right around platinum, where players are trying to play the higher level macro game but still are gonna be susceptible in their micro to a 6 pool.

Either way its been fun to just BM and rush super early, I've been mixing it up a little bit and doing builds like 10 pool/10gas/10 baneling nest for 6 quick blings. But mostly its been 7 pool, send the 7th drone as soon as my pool is done to poke at their main, so so often they will assume that because that drone is there there is no cheese coming and as long as I can distract them for 10-15 seconds (delaying warpgate placement, maybe killing the rax SCV) then I can get a free win.

11/20/2010 2:30:06 AM

i don't know what rating he actually was, but he was pretty terrible. he didn't have good attack timings, i don't know when he saw your expo, but he did a terrible job of denying your econ. give me a week of playing nothing but zerg to figure out how to spend money (i drone harder than idra, and don't actually make units, EVAR) and i'd probably be a better zerg, just because i have basic RTS skills he lacks (when to attack, when to invest in army/econ, how to expo, how to scout)

zags plays him without maphax and zags wins 9/10 times

figured out how to play infestor in dota btw. not sure if i'll remember but before it got out of hand thanks to a feeding teammate (how the hell do you go 1-19 as stalker? it's SO easy) i was 9-3-10.

[Edited on November 20, 2010 at 3:42 AM. Reason : asf]

11/20/2010 3:40:44 AM

Stalker is actually one of those units where you can just go completeeeeely off. He is so incredibly item based that if you are losing that much money you are gonna do bad. When I play him it all depends on how many early kills I can get - if I can pick up 5 or so kills before level 10 chances are I'll rape late game just because of my additional 1000-1500 minerals, but if I don't manage to get any kills then I'll end up much slower in the late game as I'll be down a shard.

I'm not 100% but I think I just ran into titan78's smurf account on ladder? If not then which of you is tGLd? He starts the game by saying "I know you are gonna 6 pool", "I know you want the 250 win portrait" "I know you suck at 2v2 and lost 6 in a row the other night". So either BigEgo decided to start laddering as a Zerg or titan78 has been hiding an account . We actually had a decent match, I went fast bling -> muta, he went hydra/roach, I followed with mass bling/sling and took out a shit ton of drones and gged him :p


[Edited on November 20, 2010 at 8:31 AM. Reason : a]

[Edited on November 20, 2010 at 8:32 AM. Reason : a]

11/20/2010 8:05:49 AM

fyi, my future zvz style is 14 hatch 14 pool roach/infestor/sling.

11/20/2010 7:58:20 PM

ghost is stupid easy in dota. 9-0-2 in a short game

11/20/2010 8:39:39 PM

Yeah no shit thats what ive been saying. Too bad the other night when you were ghost and i was the snake dude you went like 0-5-3 .

And i still want to know who i played this morning. It had to be titans78 (considering he said we went 0-6) and he was my partner for that. I am happy I won tho because while I am rated higher then him normally I think his macro is superior to mine by far.

11/20/2010 9:22:28 PM

haha it was me, I played 2 quick games early this morning before work and then when your name popped up was like... "i'm def going to screw with him." Pretty crazy odds we'd play, I mean there has to be a lot of people on b.net and we get matched up?

I was still expecting a 6 pool even when I called you out on it and that screwed up my build. I was horrible after that and you had me good although if I didn't screw up my wall off not once but twice might have came back. Macroed my way back into the game a few times but just made to many mistakes. I really hate ZvZ, it doesn't match up to my play style at all. On my new account I am only platinum but only play 1800+ diamond players and all my losses at this point are zvz. Really got the other matchups down but I just don't like that one. To much micro, and I suck at that but can usually out macro most non-elite players easily.

But it was pretty funny seeing me fucking with him though. Every few minutes I'd just like say something nobody would know. The 250 win Icon was my favorite. Figured you were sitting there just like, "WTF??"

11/20/2010 9:39:28 PM

Haha oh man I was crackin up. Between the odds of you being on at a time I never see you on ane the fact that I was super hung over i was like wtf is going on. At first I thought it was someone I had 6pooled previously until you said I lost 6 2v2s in a row. That was a pretty good game though. You would go roach. Of course my 1/1 lings raped em

11/20/2010 9:52:01 PM

ok lame yes but it made me chuckle

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzMhh8zhTiY

11/21/2010 10:29:15 PM